


Soulmate Syndrome

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Following
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 19:00:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5102045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Only one in every five hundred thousand people will have a verifiable soulmate born in their lifetime,” Ryan’s high school biology teacher told their class.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soulmate Syndrome

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



“Only one in every five hundred thousand people will have a verifiable soulmate born in their lifetime,” Ryan’s high school biology teacher told their class. Ryan remembers. “The eagle-eyed among you will see this means there’s better than million-to-one odds.”

“But only just,” Ryan tells himself now, under his breath. And they weren’t odds he’d have ever wanted to bet on.

Back when he’d been in elementary school, he’d known a girl with a soulmate, the real kind, not the imaginary kind, not the kind that would tell each other _you’re my soulmate!_ like that shit happened by happy accident and you’d walk into your classroom one day when you were eight years old and meet the one person who actually shared a part of your soul. It didn’t happen like that. There were tests for it, had been since the mid-1800s though they’d gotten better, more scientific, over time. Usually, they weren’t even born on the same continent. Governments were working on a database.

The girl’s name was Sally and her soulmate was Agnès, an eighty-four-year-old French woman who spoke no English at all. Sally said they didn’t need to speak the same language because they always understood each other anyway when they talked on the phone. She said it didn’t matter that they’d only met in person once, when Sally’s parents took her to France one summer when she was six years old, because they were kind of always together, in a way. That never made sense to Ryan, not really, not until the day it did. 

Agnès died when Sally was sixteen and Ryan remembers how she passed out in Geography class and took the teacher’s huge globe down on the floor with her with a crash. Her soulmate had died; she’d hung on and hung on as long as she could but she’d been over ninety in the end and passed away in her sleep. Sally was never the same after that; they call the whole thing Soulmate Syndrome, at least in the vernacular because it has a Latinate scientific name that Ryan’s only more recently gotten his tongue around, and when the link between a pair goes down it never means anything good. Sally would sit in the library whispering to herself and Ryan remembers how sorry he felt for her. He remembers hoping he’d be one of those nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight people who _didn’t_ have a soulmate born in their lifetime, because of her. But luck’s never exactly been on his side.

Maybe it should’ve been obvious. Maybe not right from the start because there wouldn’t be such a thing as soulmate testing if you just knew right off the bat, but after that he thinks maybe he should’ve known, in the first couple of weeks or the day Joe put a knife in his heart at least. But they were too busy trying to kill each other to realise. At least Ryan was. He wouldn’t’ve believed it even if someone’d drawn him a diagram.

And then the dreams started. And then he went to the prison and he saw Joe. And he threw up his lunch in the prison john afterwards because that was when he knew, that day, for the first time: he and Joe were two in a million. 

“We’re soulmates,” Joe said, the day he took his hostages, and it was offhand, off-the-cuff, just part of his rhetoric. But then he frowned like he was suddenly filled up with wonder and Ryan knew he’d figured it out, too. It wasn’t some literary metaphor taken direct from his godforsaken novel, it was a biological fact that would stand up to scrutiny, though Ryan knew the labs were pretty much all private and working on tests for people with more money than sense and some half-baked notion their fourth wife or their tennis instructor some Hollywood star was The One. The few public labs were mired in crappy tests for newborns, had been since 2011, searching out those elusive new matches. They’d not found many. Two in a million seemed like a pretty high estimate, given the current match rate.

“We’re _soulmates_ ,” Joe said, more quietly, just for him, and he smiled that smile that had always made Ryan want to tear off his face. But his hands were tied, literally. He guessed that was just as well.

And once the whole fiasco was over - why prison staff had never taken Joe seriously enough to keep him under wraps was a puzzle in itself - Ryan went to the warden and he told him Joe Carroll couldn’t be put to death. At least not until they’d both been tested and if the test was positive, no one in their right mind was going to go through with the death penalty. There were laws against it, had been since the confirmation of the physical existence of the human soul: you just couldn’t execute someone with a verified soulmate. They were special. They made breakthroughs. Maybe one day, with study, they’d even be able to synthesise the bond that soulmates had. 

“It’s a match,” the doctor said, after the testing was done. 

“Well, of course it is,” Joe said, still strapped to the exam table. Ryan was just as unsurprised as Joe was, but Max couldn’t look at him the same after that. No one could and he couldn’t blame them: his soulmate was a serial killer and Ryan worked for the FBI. It was a fucking mess.

They couldn’t execute him once the results were in. Of course, they also couldn’t let him go; the only suggestion anyone had was totally ridiculous, verging on hilarious, but Ryan found himself going along with it anyway though he knew it meant giving up everything, every _one_. Maybe he did it because it was an excuse at last to get over himself and get over the past and get away from the drink and the Bureau and the fucking downward spiral he’d been in for years where he’d wind up shooting himself or someone else or _several_ someone elses and he’d drive away everyone he loved or drag them down in the process. And besides, he had no idea what he would’ve done if they’d killed Joe so he’d known he couldn’t let it happen. It would’ve been Sally when Agnès died all over again, but with handguns. 

The prison put a bunk bed in Joe’s cell. They gave Ryan a navy blue jumpsuit that looked like something off of the deck of a warship and he walked down the corridor with an armed guard at his side. They weren’t guarding him, though - they thought they were protecting him from Joe. The irony was he was maybe the only person in the world who didn’t need it.

“Well, this is unexpected,” Joe said, once the guard had unlocked the cell and Ryan had stepped inside. Ryan gave a rap with his knuckles against the lock once the cell door was shut and the guard locked him in, waited for a second but the pointed look Ryan gave him sent him striding away. He couldn’t blame the guy for staring, he guessed; soulmates were pretty damn rare, even when one of them wasn’t an infamous murderer. 

Ryan took the bottom bunk by choice, maybe because he liked to be sure he knew where Joe was. Joe being up on the top bunk and out of sight didn’t make him any less chatty than normal, though; _damn_ the guy liked the sound of his own voice. It didn’t even make a difference that they were sharing a cell and a toilet and a washbasin and a desk and a set of towels and they ate together that night before they slept, and ate together in the morning and then at lunchtime and then dinner again while Joe talked and talked until Ryan was actually talking back. They got into conversations over the first week and the dreams stopped. He guessed at least he knew what’d caused them because it turned out Joe had been dreaming them, too. Fucking Soulmate Syndrome. He hadn’t asked for this.

The folks from the Soulmate Institute came by three weeks later. The warden had Joe put in shackles and Ryan walked with him without a set of his own because, of course, he was still pretty much free to go whenever he chose and he just chose not to go. They went down to an interview room and the scientists asked them questions and took blood and gave them tests to fill out, separately and then together. Ryan wrote down all of the answers because Joe’s hands were cuffed uselessly to the table, and no one wanted to see what Joe might’ve done with a pen anyway. No one except Ryan, who might’ve been amused, though he had no idea where the thought came from.

As a team, they were smarter. Already 27% integrated without any training, they said. They could do better than that, they said. There was a pair of soulmates in Sweden who’d gotten up to 77% integration, they said. Joe seemed amused by the idea and so they started working on it, sitting in their cell, talking, arguing, reading the literature aloud to each other, sitting together on Ryan’s bunk once the lights were out, week on week till somehow months had passed. By then, they almost didn’t need to speak. 

Four months, and they almost didn’t need to speak. They didn’t need to speak the night when Joe hopped down from the top bunk, the sound of his feet hitting the floor making Ryan’s eyes flicker open. They didn’t need to speak when Joe pulled back the blanket and slipped in on top of him, or when Ryan’s arms went around Joe’s waist, tucked in under his prison-issue t-shirt, pressed flat to the warm skin at the small of his back. Ryan knew from the literature that for most soulmates it was never sexual, it was purely intellectual, but Joe was already in his head so maybe it wasn’t a leap for Joe to be on top of him, hard against him, the way he was. Joe pressed his mouth to Ryan’s jaw, sucked there, bit not quite teasingly, and Ryan hitched one leg over the back of Joe’s calves to pull him in closer. Sex was maybe the only thing they hadn’t already done to each other, after all. 

In the morning, they hit 35% in testing. They kept on going. 

A week later, they were moved - the Soulmate Institute came to pick them up in a fleet of private vehicles with an army of private guards, the whole thing sanctioned by the federal government. Ryan could see a hundred ways they could’ve escaped, staff failing to follow protocol, flaws in the protocols themselves, and though Joe was sitting there chained to the seat with his eyes closed as the convoy moved, Ryan knew he was thinking the exact same thing. They didn’t try it. They were curious what they’d find when they got there and what they found when they got there was a maximum security suite reserved just for the two of them, stark white all over like they’d stepped into some kind of a futuristic sci-fi movie and not a place that was pretty much just another prison. It was nicer, it was fancier, but Joe was still in shackles.

There were two other pairs of soulmates there, their caseworker told them: a seventy-nine-year-old Inuit woman and a twelve-year-old girl from Texas down by the border with Mexico, and an elderly Indian guy of indeterminate age with a name Ryan couldn’t pronounce and a thirty-something Canadian woman who always smiled politely when they passed in the corridor. Ryan got the impression they were in some kind of a competition with them all and maybe with pairs from other institutes around the world but what he actually cared about more than all of that was the fact they had a view out over a lawn that ran up to a forest, that they had books to read and a real bathroom. He’d never underestimate the value of a good bathroom ever again, he remembers thinking, and they’d given them a double bed. Maybe he should’ve been surprised that they knew but he wasn’t; it was pretty tough to keep secrets in a prison, after all, and they’d never been great with discretion.

They took a shower together in the glass-walled wet room at the far end of the bathroom, Ryan pushing Joe up against the tiled wall as Joe chattered on about how the place reminded him of an overpriced five star hotel room he’d stayed in once at a conference in Edinburgh. They cooked real food in the kitchenette at the back of the living room, ate at the dining table and not sitting at a desk on chairs that were bolted to the ground. Ryan could only surmise that the Institute had eyes on them if they were being trusted with real cutlery and the means to boil water.

There were computer games the following day that were just another kind of test. Ryan had never typed faster in his life than he did with Joe hovering at his shoulder, leaning down to speak lowly by his ear, one hand at Ryan’s waist. Joe took a turn, hobbled by the cuffs he still had to wear outside of the suite but still quick nonetheless as Ryan stood there behind him, his hands at Joe’s shoulders, thumbs brushing his neck. Then they gave them an honest-to-God flat-packed Ikea furniture set with no discernible manual and had them put it together from scratch, gave them a set of logic problems then a set of three-dimensional wooden puzzles to solve and then, finally, they quit for the day. 39%, they said. They’d made progress. Ryan had never felt so damn smart in his life and they were only getting smarter. Their combined intelligence was really something.

They fucked up against the bedroom dresser that night, institute-issue white pants pushed down around their thighs, Joe bitching about how the furniture was chafing against his knees all the time Ryan was inside him but they both knew he didn’t mean a word of it. Joe did Ryan on hands and knees in the morning, then they showered and they talked and Ryan realised he’d never felt as close to anyone else as he did to Joe right then, sitting at the dining table eating a BLT like somehow this was normal. He wondered when he’d gotten used to the fact that he didn’t hate Joe after all. 

41%. They were in sync, finishing each other’s sentences out loud with the testing staff when they felt like being obnoxious, Ryan speaking for Joe for a whole week when Joe had a cold that made him totally miserable, pathetically so. They were aware of each other, hyper-aware; Ryan had to force himself to step away while they were working sometimes or they’d both get distracted by touch. They let themselves when they got back to the suite.

47% and Ryan wasn’t holding back anymore, not an inch and not for a second because he guessed Joe already knew him better than he knew himself. 50% once they’d been there six weeks and apparently they’d gotten ahead of one of the other pairs there in the compound but what Ryan was interested in was how it felt to 50% integrated with Joe, whatever the hell that really meant. They lay side-by-side at night and what Joe was thinking was right on the tip of Ryan’s tongue like a thought he’d had but just forgotten. At 50% they were sharing dreams every few nights. At 56% it was _every_ night. The dreams were so bloody sometimes that Ryan expected to wake up stained with it. Joe knew he enjoyed them. 

“What happens if we reach 100%?” Joe asked the testers one morning. 

“No one ever has,” they replied, and Ryan knew that just meant they didn’t know. But they wanted to find out.

The first time he dreamed he was Joe, it was unsettling to say the least. He remembers how it felt, the sensation of wearing Joe’s body, how his hearing was different, how his mouth felt different when he talked though when he talked he still had his own accent, but with Joe’s vocal cords and the effect was pretty odd. He looked at himself through Joe’s eyes, literally, but it was Joe there in his body and not him, he could tell it just from the way he stood even before he said a word. 

“Well, this is different,” Joe said. 

“Yeah, Joe, you’re a fucking genius,” Ryan replied. 

Joe smiled his usual smile with Ryan’s mouth. “By the usual definitions, yes.” 

Ryan sighed and shook his head and that felt different. He put his hand to his chest and that felt different, too, without the ever-present pacemaker there under his skin, though he guessed it was really Joe’s skin. He wondered if that even mattered and when they woke he guessed it didn’t because all Joe did was tug Ryan over on top of him, twist his fingers into his hair and they kissed, hotly, hard. Ryan had wanted the same thing. They always wanted the same thing. It was getting hard to separate what he wanted from what Joe did.

At six months and 67% they’d surpassed both other pairs in the compound and all but one of the pairs around the world, the Swedish teenagers in the compound just outside of Stockholm. They hit 70% a couple of weeks after that and the researchers and testers were so damn excited by it that they put on Joe’s shackles and they let them out on the grounds under guard, just for an hour or two. It was summer then, not that it felt that way in the air-conditioned testing rooms or their blank white suite but it was warm outside and they sat together on the lawn by the edge of the woods and to hell with the bright white jumpsuits they were wearing; neither of them cared that they were getting covered in grass stains when Ryan straddled Joe’s thighs and pressed his mouth to his throat. 

It was awkward because Joe’s hands and feet were shackled and chained to the chain that looped around his waist, but that didn’t stop them. The guards turned away though Ryan guessed they were meant to have eyes on them the whole time; the guards gave them a good fifty feet or more and stepped out of sight behind some shrubbery, maybe complacent by then because Joe hadn’t tried anything creepy or dangerous in the whole time they’d been there. Maybe they could’ve escaped then, Ryan thinks, but what he did was slick Joe’s cock with the Vaseline he’d been using on his air-conditioning-chapped lips and he sank down on it, riding him slowly, his hands at the cuffs around Joe’s hands. 

When they hit 75% integration they didn’t need to speak at all anymore, not that that stopped them. Joe was too fond of the sound of his own voice for that and Ryan had discovered he didn’t mind listening most of the time because barriers were falling; sometimes when Joe spoke he was saying what Ryan was thinking. Sometimes when Ryan spoke he knew the words were Joe’s. And that was when they first knew what was going to happen, what their endgame was, where they were going and what they had to do because they knew they could take it further. They could raise the percentage again. They could keep going till they hit 100% because there was nothing to stop them. And so they started to throw their tests, just a fraction, just enough to keep the testers thinking their progress had slowed, just enough so that six weeks later they were officially stalled out at 76%. 

“It seems there’s a natural barrier to further integration for some pairs,” one of their regular testers told them, clearly disappointed. They’d been showing so much promise. They’d keep testing and keep training and keep hoping, of course, but it was clear they thought Joe and Ryan weren’t going to beat the Stockholm pair after all. 

Except they did, they just did it privately, they just kept it between themselves. They’d been there nearly nine months when they knew they were past 80% and climbing. When Joe ate, it was like Ryan could taste it. When Ryan tripped and scraped his knee, Joe cursed like he could feel it, too. In bed that night, they fucked face to face and looking up at Joe, Joe moving inside him, it was like a fucking infinity mirror, the two of them reflected together again and again till Joe wasn’t just Joe and Ryan wasn’t just Ryan and everything they saw and felt and did was both of them, reflexive, endlessly recursive, not just one or the other. Maybe that was what had always stopped the other pairs’ progression. Maybe they weren’t willing to give themselves up the way they did. Ryan couldn’t have cared less where he ended and Joe began.

The Institute let Max and Mike visit when they’d been there nearly a year and Ryan smiled and made small talk like they were all one big happy family and he told them really, the place was great, he’d been sober the whole time, he hadn’t felt that good in years. But they were both looking at him like he’d lost his mind and he realised it was because here and there his damn accent was slipping just an inch, sliding into Joe’s. He laughed it off, told them he guessed he’d been spending too much time around the guy, but he could feel Joe’s amusement in him so acutely that it was hard to keep Joe’s familiar smirk off of his face. 

“I’m glad you’re doing okay,” Max said when they got up to leave, and she hugged him warily. “76% sounds pretty good. Just...don’t let him get too deep inside your head, okay?”

He didn’t say they were closer to 93%, admittedly by their own reckoning. He didn’t say Joe was already in his head. He didn’t say he never, ever left it. 

“Y’know, you could get out of here, come back to work,” Mike said. “We miss you out there, Ryan. It’s not like you couldn’t visit him if you had to.” Mike hugged him, clapped him on the back. “You know this place is just another prison, right? You shouldn’t be locked up. They’re never gonna let Joe go.”

Ryan didn’t say he knew that. He didn’t say they had a plan. 

The higher the integration percentage, the more Ryan had trouble telling who the hell he was on a daily basis. He’d look into the mirror as he brushed his teeth or he’d look over at Joe at the computer or he’d turn to him in bed just to see who he was, which one of them he was, and Joe was doing the exact same thing. They didn’t need to talk but they did it anyway, kept up the charade, and past 12 months, 13, 14, they started to argue. They started to curse at each other and fuck with their hands around each other’s throats like all of this was wearing thin, like they couldn’t stand each other, like everything that’d stood between them before their fucking Soulmate Syndrome had come crashing back through, ripping their percentage back down. People started to take notice of it. There were whispers. Joe heard them or Ryan did and it didn’t matter which because they both knew, they _both_ heard. 

Their percentage rose. And then it was time.

He’s been back with the FBI for three years now. They took him back not without qualms because they knew what’d happened but they were willing to give him a shot and he’s been on the straight and narrow since, done things strictly by the book. The higher-ups have no regrets and Max and Mike are pleased he’s there with them again, are used to his newer quirks, figure there had to be some fallout because you don’t lose your soulmate and get out of it unscathed. They’d gotten back together sometime while Ryan was away and he went to the wedding, gave Max away; he goes round to their place for dinner once a week, every week, and drinks non-alcoholic wine at the dinner table while he smiles and they chat and they _don’t_ mention Joe Carroll. They think he regrets what happened. He doesn’t.

He doesn’t regret what they did, because they both knew they had to do it - there was nothing else to do. He doesn’t regret the argument in the living room of their Institute suite, doesn’t regret telling Joe he wished he’d let the execution go ahead as planned because they both knew he didn’t mean it. He doesn’t regret the struggle, a kitchen knife in Joe’s hand that he’d been using to chop onions for dinner like Joe had ever been much of a cook. But he remembers exactly how it felt as he wrenched the knife from Joe’s hand. He remembers how it felt as Joe’s hands went up around Ryan’s throat and squeezed till his was getting light-headed, remembers the moment he knew they were going to go through with it and that Joe wasn’t scared. Neither was he. It was the only way.

He pushed the knife into Joe’s back; Joe’s hands left Ryan’s throat and the two of them went down to the floor together in a heap. And Ryan could feel it, they could both feel it, the blade right through Joe’s abdominal aorta. Ryan pulled it back out and he let him bleed as they felt Joe dying and all he could do then was pull him into his arms, both of them covered in Joe’s blood already. 

There was no need to say he was sorry, because he wasn’t. There was no need to say the words they’d never said because Joe knew already. In the moment that Joe died there in Ryan’s arms, they finally hit 100%. 

These days, in the daytime, he’s Ryan Hardy, Agent Hardy, _Special Agent_ Hardy if anyone wants to get technical. There’s something different about him but they’ve all heard the horror stories about separated soulmates and they guess that it must be tough for him, Ryan thinks. It’s not. 

When he dreams, he’s Ryan. At night when he dreams, he dreams he’s with Joe back at the Institute or he dreams of the day they met or he dreams them a life that they never had together there in New York, a life where Joe teaches college English and Ryan’s still hunting serial killers in the field for a living and not working his way into middle-management the way he is. He dreams Joe’s damn acerbic wit and his smile and his hands and his body because he still knows every inch of him. He dreams they fuck in his bed and they jog in the park and he sits in on Joe’s lectures, but he doesn’t regret. There was no other way for it to end.

He picks up his gun from the table by the door. He lets himself out of his apartment. Tomorrow night he’ll have dinner with Max and Mike and he’ll smile and laugh but now, after hours, between work and sleep, he’s something else: he’s not Ryan, because Ryan Hardy doesn’t cover it. Because 100% was the magic number, just like they’d known it would be. 

When he kills tonight, it won’t just be him holding the knife. Joe’s always right there with him; they don’t need to talk because Joe _is_ him, and he’s Joe. He has no regrets and neither has Joe. Ryan’s body’s more than enough for both their souls.

They’re together now. And they’re free.


End file.
